In Poker Size Counts

One of the great things about no-limit Hold’em is you have the opportunity to make a bet of whatever size you would like. This gives you much freedom and also allows you to dictate the odds your opponents will be taking if they elect to call.

Whilst I am an advocate for making standard raise sizes preflop in order to completely mask the strength of your hand, I do believe that you should be making different sized bets on later streets, but not based on your hand strength but instead based on the texture of the flop.

When discussing flop texture, two terms are generally used. If a flop, or board, contains a number of possible draws it is often referred to as being wet, whilst one containing no or very few unlikely draws would be called dry. A typical wt flop would be one that reads KhQhJs but a dry flop would look something like Kh7c2d.

Bets made on dry flops could and should be smaller than those made on a wet flop. This is because on a dry flop it is usually a case of hit or miss, in that your opponent will have either hit the flop hard or completely missed it. He will miss more often that he hits so it makes sense to bet smaller and put less chips at risk.

Quite the opposite is true of wet flops, which require a larger bet than their dry counterparts. Poker Tips suggest that wet flops are much more likely to have hit your opponents in some way and even if they have not pair one or both of their holecards, they could have picked up one of a number of draws so you risk being outdrawn by the river. Betting enough to give your opponents insufficient pot odds and implied pot odds, often with a ¾ or pot sized bet, is a much better idea than betting a smaller amount such as ½ pot as this will force your opponents to pay the maximum for their draws, making a mistake in the process.

The next time you sit down to play cash games or a poker tournament take extra notice of the texture of the flop, even when you are not involved in a hand, and think of an amount you would and would not call based on a specific hand. Doing this will help you to decide how much to bet on both types of boards when you are next in action yourself.